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Tuesday, 19 July 2011

Leveson

Most readers will be aware that the UK Prime Minister, David Cameron, has appointed Lord Justice Leveson to oversee a public inquiry into phone hacking and media regulation. Sir Brian Henry Leveson QC is also known as Lord Leveson. His surname is one of those tricky British names not necessarily pronounced in the way the spelling would lead you to expect.

According to the BBC Pronouncing Dictionary of British Names (1990), the Christian name (forename) Leveson is ˈluːs(ə)n, and the surname Leveson-Gower, the family name of the Earls of Granville, is ˈluːs(ə)n ˈɡɔː(r).

I suspect that as a forename Leveson is now obsolete, and I don't believe there is any Leveson-Gower now active in British public life, though several members of the family were active in politics in former centuries. Furthermore, Sir H.D.G. Leveson-Gower was a well-known cricketer, captaining the English test side in 1909/10. His brother Frederick was also a county cricketer, and in 1895 played for the Gentlemen of England against Oxford and Cambridge. (Oh, long-lost era of gentleman amateurs!)

At one end stocky Jessop frowned,The human catapultWho wrecks the roofs of distant townsWhen set in his assault.His mate was that perplexing manWe know as "Looshun-Gore",It isn’t spelt at all that way,We don’t know what it’s for.But as with Cholmondeley and St. JohnThe alphabet is mixed,And Yankees cannot help but ask -"Why don't you get it fixed?"

EPD/CPD confirms ˈluːs(ə)n in Leveson-Gower, but does not tell us anything about a forename. It does, however, say that the simple surname Leveson is ˈlevɪs(ə)n.

Back to Sir Brian. He does not appear to be related to the Leveson-Gowers. The BBC Pronunciation Unit tell me that some fifteen years ago his office gave the pronunciation of his name as ˈlevəsən, which we can take as a minor variant of ˈlevɪs(ə)n. Jo Kim tells me “I checked this again with the Sentencing Council press office today (Lord Justice Leveson is the Chairman) and they confirmed that ˈlevəsən reflects his own pronunciation“. (Thanks, Jo.)

That didn’t stop the Home Secretary, Theresa May, referring to him as Lord ˈliːvɪsən in the House of Commons yesterday.

20 comments:

2. I never knew - not that this bothered me much - whether Gower is gɔə, same as gore, which is routinely given as identical. The rhyme with fɔː speaks against this.

3. Does the poet mean to rhyme catapult with assault? (Probably not. The only rhyme seems to be for - Gore.)

4. Scansion implies the author has sn ˈdʒɒn (or more than two syllables for Cholmondeley), which ruins the point.

Ad rem, the judge's name is Jewish, etymologically "Levi's son", so I shouldn't expect it to be pronounced like the Staffordshire Levesons. (The earliest ancestor I could find on the quick was a Richard Leveson, died about 1346.)

But how shall I pronounce "Gower"? I have a rhotic accent and a NORTH-FORCE distinction, so I can't take gɔː at face value. For me, any of gɔː, gɔr or goːr would be consistent with the above IPA.

This is one of those cases where a respelling system (like the one they had in the OED) would actually be more useful than IPA. Then we could distinguish between the above options with gaw, gor or gore.

Pete, my system of lexical sets is an attempt to deal with your problem. I assume that in Leveson-Gower the second part is treated as FORCE, and is for everyone a homophone of Gore. (Otherwise, of course, Gower - as in the Welsh peninsula and in Gower St, London WC1 - rhymes with "tower", and has the MOUTH vowel plus schwa, r-coloured if rhotic.)

Also on the hacking scandal, I find it strange that some journalists are calling the News of the World's ultimate parent company njuːz kɔː. The company's name is News Corporation, colloquially abbreviated to News Corp: clearly, the second word in this abbreviation is not the French word corps ('body'), which is what journalists must be thinking of when they pronounce Corp as kɔː. I can't see any justification for making the p silent in this word.

What is this "homophone corps" (with "a meaning tolerably close to corporation") you're on about, David? I've never come across it in my more than 60 years' experience of English..!

Steve was asking why "News Corp." (as an abbreviation of "News Corporation" sometimes gets pronounced with the "p" sounded and sometimes as if "Corp." were the loaned-from-French word "corps" (as in "esprit de corps").

I've noticed this split too, though -- in my hearing -- those commentators who drop the final "p" in "News Corp." have invariably been American, leading me to think that that is how it is said over there. I've yet to hear a BrE speaker say it that way, though.

Kevin, you must have lived a very sheltered life down there in Swansea. At school (in England) we had a Combined Cadet Corps. There is a Royal Army Corps. The Americans have a US Army Corps of Engineers. In each case it's pronounced kɔː(r), as a homophone of core.

I'm pretty sure I've heard both (British) MPs and (probably British) BBC journalists use the 'silent p' pronunciation. I'm also pretty sure that, when I worked for News International in the 1980s, everyone around me called the parent company ˈnjuːz ˌkɔːp.